"The City Is My Mother": Narratives of Schizophrenia and Homelessness

Recent narrative analysis in medical anthropology provides keys to both the personal meaning of illness and the historical, cultural, and institutional shaping of that experience. Yet Western psychiatric thinking and practice continue to view schizophrenic discourse as closed to interpretation. Caught in this "closed text," the self would seem obliterated. But using narratives of schizophrenia and homelessness, this essay proposes a different understanding of schizophrenic alterity. The openness of the text-as-experience is re-created collectively, from outside the subject's narration: the subject's "self is construction through the added perspectives of his or her interlocutors in the role of storymakers.     

Embodied narratives of disaster: the expression of bodily experience in Aceh,Indonesia

The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 caused massive destruction to coastal Aceh, Indonesia, and left countless numbers of people dead or wounded. This article focuses on the embodied narratives of three Acehnese women who survived the disaster and, like many others in Aceh, told their stories ‘through’ their bodies. A detailed ethnographic account of their narratives reveals how the body stretches temporally between the ‘narrated event’ and the ‘narrative event’, both through the representation of the body in narratives and through the embodied performance of narratives. Moving beyond meaning‐centred analyses of narratives, I argue that the central accomplishment of these narratives is that they convey poignant bodily experiences to others and thereby create a shared, post‐disaster, world. Ultimately, through these embodied narratives of disaster people remake their world, with others, in the wake of its ‘unmaking’.     

Inference or Enaction? The Impact of Genre on the Narrative Processing of Other Minds

Do narratives shape how humans process other minds or do they presuppose an existing theory of mind? This study experimentally investigated this problem by assessing subject responses to systematic alterations in the genre, levels of intentionality, and linguistic complexity of narratives. It showed that the interaction of genre and intentionality level are crucial in determining how narratives are cognitively processed. Specifically, genres that deployed evolutionarily familiar scenarios (relationship stories) were rated as being higher in quality when levels of intentionality were increased; conversely, stories that lacked evolutionary familiarity (espionage stories) were rated as being lower in quality with increases in intentionality level. Overall, the study showed that narrative is not solely either the origin or the product of our intuitions about other minds; instead, different genres will have different—even opposite—effects on how we understand the mind states of others.     

Poetic Duels and Political Change in the Gayo Highlands of Sumatra

Discourse, and particularly discourse in dialogue form, recently has been proposed as a privileged arena for the interaction of language and society. This article examines the process by which performances of public dialogue have been structured and restructured in Gayo society, Indonesia, from 1900 to 1945. I trace changes in the formal, semantic, and contextual features of Gayo poetic duels. The integration of Gayo society into colonial and postcolonial sociopolitical frameworks is shown to have opened up performance to competing political voices, in Bakhtin's sense. Implications are drawn for current research on dialogues as models for social relations.     

Nature–Society Dynamics,Policy Narratives,and Ecosystem Management: Integrating Perspectives On Upland Change and Complexity in Central Sulawesi,Indonesia

In the context of ecosystem change and significant sociocultural, political, and institutional complexity, ecosystem managers and scientists (natural and social) need to be sensitive to processes of knowledge construction and legitimization and to the influence that explanations, or narratives, of change and complexity have on the policy process. Using the Banawa-Marawola uplands of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, as an example, this review shows how narratives of change and complexity linking the subsistence agroecological practices of upland communities, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, and the policy interventions that result, emerge within several institutionalized and embedded perspectives, including (a) an entrenched political and administrative discourse on modernization and development in Indonesia, (b) a subsequent emphasis on the culturalization or civilization of upland groups considered backward or primitive, and (c) linear or equilibrium explanations of upland change linking population growth and environmental decline. As this review suggests, integrative analyses require historically sensitive frameworks that take into account the sociocultural, politicoinstitutional, and ecological dimensions of change and complexity. Such frameworks are more likely to succeed in challenging the stabilizing assumptions about the role of local people in ecosystem modification, particularly in regions where there is a long history of nature–society interaction.     

Visibilities,invisibilities and twilight zones at the crime scene in Portugal

The Police are the first element of a chain of custody culminating in the court. The documents they produce mediate the understandings between the crime scene and the court. Based on the formal rules, the police give visibility to the narrative and assign legitimacy and credibility to their performance. However, the decision to turn certain aspects of the narrative visible, leaving others in a twilight zone may have repercussions in the production of a verdict. Based in a qualitative analysis of three Portuguese judicial proceedings in this paper I explore how the narrative constructed by the police, based on what they see and what is unseen, travels between subepistemic cultures. Looking at the visibilities, invisibilities and twilight zones, I will try to understand how police forces at the crime scene in Portugal construct their narratives through the use of biological traces and how these narratives are part of the construction of the evidence. I argue that in criminal investigations in Portugal, the production of a narrative with legal meaning in court can be conditioned by the co-existence of the epistemic subcultures of police work (different police forces at the crime scene) that have different knowledge, practices, understandings and ways of “seeing” the forensic evidence. The degree of technological enthusiasm that guides the performance of different police forces at the crime scene is reflected in the way they “see” the scene and in the sociocultural understandings that they produce. This technological enthusiasm and what I call here “selective professional vision” are mobilized at the crime scene and can impact the robustness and efficiency of the evidence presented in court.     

Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Comparing Mental Illness Narratives of Haredi Male Patients and their Rabbis

By comparing versions of mental illness narratives – told by Haredi (Utraorthodox Jews) male patients of a mental health clinic in Israel and by their rabbis – this paper relates to two distinct, yet interrelated, theoretical questions: the place and agency of narrators, and the tension between experience and representation. A pair of narratives exemplifies a pattern in which the patients (Talmudic students) tell a narrative of a sudden breakdown related to a dramatic meeting with a non-human figure (often, a woman) or force. Their rabbis, by contrast, tell a narrative that emphasizes their students' mundane symptoms, ``abnormal' and ``immoral' behavior, and use a local adaptation of a Western psychological explanatory model. A dynamic of inclusion and exclusion emerges as students are seeking legitimization and avoidance of stigma, while their rabbis are silencing themes that challenge social and cultural orders. The different narratives are further interpreted in the context of the micropolitics of the interviews and of identity politics between the Haredim and secular Israelis. This social dynamics shows how differently placed social actors-narrators-interpreters construct differently contested and diverse cultural narratives of a seemingly shared reality.     

Risky subjects: narrative,literary <Emphasis Type="Italic">testimonio</Emphasis> and legal testimony

This article compares the textual production of legal testimony with that of literary testimonio. Using the controversy sparked by David Stoll’s exposé of Rigoberta Menchú’s less than “factual” account of her life lived amidst the genocide of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, the analysis asks why Menchú should be indicted or acquitted based on cultural notions of legal testimony. I use the concept of language ideologies to explore how listeners hold narrators to standards of truth. By suggesting that there are interpretive ideologies of narrative production and function at work, the argument is made that any detractor can find a way to discredit narrative truth. I show this by examining how Latina women and state actors create legal testimony about domestic abuse. While these narratives share much with the Menchú testimonio, in particular the risks they present to their narrators, I conclude that the everyday victim in the U.S. adversarial system has much more to lose, and inevitably has far less discursive power, than Menchú. I examine these topics and themes from sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspectives.     

Conceiving silence: infertility as discursive contradiction in Ireland

This article examines the production and reproduction of silence around infertility in Ireland. Based on narratives collected during 18 months of fieldwork, this article locates the contradictory role of silence in both the private experiences of individuals faced with a difficulty conceiving and in institutions constituted as mechanisms of public support. For many people who experience infertility, silence is rooted in the social stigma associated with reproductive failure or sexual inadequacy. Silence protects privacy while at the same time foreclosing both challenges to assumptions that fertility is the norm and any counterdiscourse to the heteronormative, profamily society in Ireland. I show how the reproduction of silence about infertility is a legacy of Ireland's history, reproductive politics, and the cultural idiom of choice. I argue that support networks and Internet bulletin boards on websites create opportunities to dialogue in silence, reproducing isolation rather than creating public discourse.     

Teaching reading,writing, speaking and risk: dialoguing with Eades,French and Lecuna

This article compares the textual production of legal testimony with that of literary testimonio. Using the controversy sparked by David Stoll’s exposé of Rigoberta Menchú’s less than “factual” account of her life lived amidst the genocide of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, the analysis asks why Menchú should be indicted or acquitted based on cultural notions of legal testimony. I use the concept of language ideologies to explore how listeners hold narrators to standards of truth. By suggesting that there are interpretive ideologies of narrative production and function at work, the argument is made that any detractor can find a way to discredit narrative truth. I show this by examining how Latina women and state actors create legal testimony about domestic abuse. While these narratives share much with the Menchú testimonio, in particular the risks they present to their narrators, I conclude that the everyday victim in the U.S. adversarial system has much more to lose, and inevitably has far less discursive power, than Menchú. I examine these topics and themes from sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspectives.     

Southern Trauma: Revisiting Caste and Class in the Mississippi Delta

Two classic ethnographies, Hortense Powdermaker's After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South and John Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town , contributed to a "master narrative" of the Mississippi Delta and the South that viewed class largely through the lens of race. Their work contributed to the community studies and culture and personality traditions and became part of the public discourse of race in the United States. This article examines the institutional and theoretical frameworks within which they worked. We focus on three aspects of their work: (1) their definition of class that left race as the only salient social divide; (2) their portrayal of middle- and upper-class statements as normative; and (3) their uncritical use of data from elsewhere in the South to interpret their Indianola data. We report the events at the Yale Institute of Human Relations that led Dollard to publish before Powdermaker.     

CONSTRUCTING PREHISTORY: LITHIC ANALYSIS IN THE LEVANTINE EPIPALAEOLITHIC

This study explores the way in which our picture of the Levantine Epipalaeolithic has been created, investigating the constructs that take us from found objects to coherent narrative about the world. Drawing on the treatment of chipped stone, the fundamental raw material of prehistoric narratives, it examines the use of figurative devices – of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche – to make the connection between the world and the words we need to describe it. The work of three researchers is explored in a case study of the Middle Epipalaeolithic with the aim of showing how different research goals and methodologies have created characteristics for the period that are so entrenched in discourse as to have become virtually invisible. Yet the definition of distinct cultures with long-lasting traditions, the identification of two separate ethnic trajectories linked to separate environmental zones, and the analysis of climate as the key driver of change all rest on analytical manoeuvres to transform objects into data.     

Policy actors' narrative constructions of migrants' integration in Malmö and Bologna

Governments have policies explicitly directed at the integration of migrants. This article addresses how policymakers and politicians privilege certain constructions of the social relationship between migrants and the majority society (expressed through narratives of ‘integration’), while making it seem as if they were presenting facts in their policies. These constructions provide the justifications for adopting a direction in policy-making over other alternatives. This article sets to analyse comparatively how policy actors in two urban contexts construct migrants' integration through policy narratives and how, within this, they evaluate migrants as ‘integrated’ and ‘non-integrated’. Through narrative analysis, the article sheds light on how migrants are positioned by political institutions within the normative order of the society in which they live. Furthermore, it shows that local policy-making is shaped by national citizenship regimes, models of steering, welfare regimes and stories about the nation and its people.     

Towards a ``Good' Death: End-of-Life Narratives Constructed in An Intensive Care Unit

End-of-life decisions regarding the withdrawal and withholding of lifesupporting technology have become commonplace within intensive careunits (ICUs). In this paper, we examine the dialogue between ICU teammembers and families regarding limitation of treatment as a therapeuticnarrative – that is, as a story which frames therapeutic events aswell as the critically ill patient's experience in a meaningful andpsychologically comforting way for families and health care providersalike. The key themes of these end-of-life narratives are discussed, aswell as the qualities that the stories share with other narratives ofthe same genre.     

Once upon a time in the West? Stories of migration and modernity from Kerala, South India

This article explores how members of an ex-untouchable, 'backward' community of South India – the Izhavas of Kerala – represent and make sense of their entanglements within 'modernity'. Izhava narratives suggest ambivalence: while failure stories remain individualized, narrated in terms of bad luck or others' cheating, success stories are presented as exemplars of a twentieth-century global master narrative of progress. We note many correspondences between this ex-untouchable community's optimistic master narrative and another powerful and pervasive meta-narrative – the global story of modernity as development, promoted by state government, reform movements, and development theorists alike. Life-history narratives forcibly bring us – European interlocutors – into the same space as the tale-tellers, speak of encounters between Indians and Europeans, and urge us to recognize that we live in 'one world'. Malayalis stake claims for equal participation in modernity's projects even as they point out ways in which coevalness is denied. This prompts us to suggest that narratives of modernity in India and the UK should occupy the same analytical space, contrary to moves to theorize multiple modernities. With our Malayali respondents, we are participating in a confabulation/confabrication of a shared story which appears to be one about the nature of global capitalism. Modernity produces dream and disillusionment, promising progress to all while delivering to a few. In its seemingly endless capacity for self-regeneration and reinvention it is, as a phenomenon in global history, far from over. Even as theorists try to write it off as a moment past or a project failed, it still holds out its promises and provides a structuring framework for contemporary life-stories.     

Narrative ARTifice and women's agency

The choice to pursue fertility treatments is a complex one. In this paper I explore the issues of choice, agency, and gender as they relate to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). I argue that narrative approaches to bioethics such as those by Arthur Frank and Hilde Lindemann Nelson clarify judgments about autonomy and fertility medicine. More specifically, I propose two broad narrative categories that help capture the experience of encounters with fertility medicine: narratives of hope and narratives of resistance. This narrative typology captures the inevitable conflict that women feel when they become subjects of fertility medicine. On the one hand, they must remain hopeful; on the other, they must not surrender themselves completely. Nelson's account of counterstories as narratives of resistance helps us see how women can reconcile the experience of a strong desire to have children with the desire to remain authentic and whole.     

Thinking Temporally or Modernizing Anthropology

Recent changes within social and cultural anthropology have made history a key issue, but in this essay I argue that the field has yet to develop the resources that are required to deal with temporality. This point is made through an extended examination of Jean and John Comaroffs work on Christianity and colonialism in southern Africa. Arguably, the Comaroffs read history backward and then present its unfolding as a kind of inexorable logic. In doing so, they homogenize missionary and Tswana "cultures" and attribute agency to abstractions rather than to people acting in particular material contexts. In contrast, I argue for a narrative approach to historical anthropological explanation. The emergent qualities of events—and the variable ways in which capitalism, hegemony, Protestantism, and vernacular modernisms relate—require narrative for explanation, narrative that encompasses within itself the narratives of social actors themselves, [historical anthropology, narrative, the modern, South Africa]     

The State of Play Activity Among Today’s Preschoolers

The article examines the attributes of play among today’s preschoolers. It discusses typical narratives for play and the level of its development. Data for today’s children is compared with the results of studying children with the same methodology fifty-five years ago. The comparison shows a reduced level of development of narrative role-playing among today’s children, which slows down the full-fledged development of voluntary behavior. The lack of developed narrative role-playing leads to the social and personal underdevelopment of children.